Purpose : This study builds on the awareness that job demands in high-growth industries can affect employees’ ability to balance work and family roles. It investigates how demographic factors influence strategies that employees in Ghanaian banks adopt to cope with such work-life conflicts and their implications for their job satisfaction. The authors adopted a quantitative research approach, collecting data from 263 employees of 4 Ghanaian banks. The data were further analysed using IBM SPSS Version 21 and then AMOS Version 21. The results show that work-family conflict is not gender-specific but rather a problem for both males and females. Furthermore, age and education do not significantly contribute to the employees' work-family conflict experiences. Coping strategies particularly reactive role behaviour coping strategies such as time management, waking up early to work on family obligations before work roles help to reduce work-family conflicts. Ghanaian bank management is encouraged to support their employees by introducing policies such as allowing them to work from home one day a week or introducing childcare arrangements at work to reduce work and family-related stressors. This study has important implications for work-life balance in high growth industries. There is a dearth of knowledge about how rapidly changing work demands in high-growth economic sectors have challenged work-life balance in Africa. The study helps fill that gap.
The transformation of Turkish politics during more than two decades of Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule has generated a substantial literature on democratic backsliding, presidentialism, populism, clientelism, political Islam, and competitive authoritarianism. These perspectives have considerably advanced understanding of Turkey's changing political order, but they tend to privilege either formal institutions or regime-level characteristics. This article develops a complementary relational explanation. It argues that political power in contemporary Turkey is produced through the interaction of formal institutions with networks connecting political parties, state bureaucracies, municipalities, businesses, religious communities, civil society organizations, families, local intermediaries, and individual citizens. Formal institutions establish authoritative positions and control important resources, but networks shape access to those positions and influence how resources, information, opportunities, protection, and political influence circulate. Drawing on the literature on embeddedness, social capital, brokerage, clientelism, business-state relations, local government, digital surveillance, religious organization, and Kurdish politics, the article traces the historical foundations of relational politics in Turkey and examines their transformation during the AKP era. It develops the concepts of social liability and network revaluation to explain why connections that provide resources under one configuration of political power may generate dependency, exclusion, suspicion, or exposure when that configuration changes. The Turkish case demonstrates that political transformation involves more than institutional change. It entails the construction, displacement, fragmentation, and revaluation of networks. Contemporary Turkey is therefore best understood as a networked political order in which formal authority and relational power are mutually constitutive.
In Spinoza scholarship, particularly in interpretations that explicitly or implicitly draw on the Hegelian reading of Spinoza, it has often been argued that substance is something indeterminate, since neither the attributes nor the modes are capable of determining its nature. On the one hand, it is maintained that, in order to serve as the substratum of a multiplicity of different attributes, substance cannot coincide with any one of them and therefore cannot be determined by any of them. On the other hand, it is argued that, since modes are nothing other than affections of substance, they cannot contribute to determining it. The thesis of the indeterminacy of substance consequently leads to a reduction of the attributes to intellectual forms and of the modes to evanescent entities. Spinoza’s philosophy would thus amount to an “acosmism,” insofar as it would deny the multiplicity of essences and entities that populate the world. For the same reason, it would amount to an empty monism. In this contribution, I will first address the problem of the determinacy or indeterminacy of substance by reformulating what I take to be the most compelling solution to the longstanding dispute over the attributes. I will then turn to the alleged evanescence of modes, arguing that it does not entail a denial of the multiplicity of things as such, but only the rejection of a particular way of conceiving them. Adopting a methodology that combines close textual reading with theoretical analysis, I argue that Spinoza’s monism is not an empty monism, but rather a dense monism: the substance is by no means indeterminate, but is instead defined by its attributes, understood as essence of the substance, and expressed through its modes, understood as properties of the substance.
Gender-based violence (GBV) has predominantly been studied as a problem affecting women and girls, leaving men's own perceptions of violence comparatively invisible in research, policy and service provision. This study examined men's perceptions and awareness of GBV in Madukani Ward, Dodoma City, Tanzania. A qualitative exploratory design informed by a phenomenological approach was adopted. Twenty participants were purposively selected: fifteen men residing in the ward and five key informants from ward administration, religious leadership, the police Gender and Children's Desk and the One-Stop Centre. Data were generated through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions and analysed thematically. Most men understood GBV mainly as physical violence against women, particularly wife-beating, while emotional, psychological, economic and sexual abuse were rarely recognised and were often normalised as ordinary marital disagreements. Men were seldom recognised as potential victims, and the boundary between marital conflict and violence was blurred. Interpreted through Hegemonic Masculinity Theory, these findings show that dominant ideals of male strength, endurance and household authority narrow what men count as violence and render male victimisation invisible. The study concludes that physically centred, female-victim-focused understandings of GBV limit men's recognition of the full spectrum of gender-based harm. It recommends community education that broadens men's understanding of GBV and gender-transformative interventions that engage men as potential perpetrators, victims, witnesses and partners in prevention.
This article examines Gintama through a postmodern framework, arguing that the series mobilizes parody, pastiche, and metafiction not merely as stylistic devices but as critical strategies for interrogating cultural authority, historical narration, and subject formation in Japanese modernity. Rather than treating Gintama as a site of intertextual excess alone, the analysis demonstrates how its hybrid Edo setting and persistent self-reflexivity destabilize distinctions between past and present, fiction and reality, and tradition and modernity. Drawing on theories of postmodernism and subjectivity, the article further explores how the series reconfigures identity as historically contingent and challenges modernist classifications of normativity and deviance. By situatingGintamawithin broader debates on anime and postmodern culture, the article argues that postmodernism operates not as a purely Western formation, but as a critical logic that emerges across diverse historical contexts.
